He writes the Songs

During a recent Pat Kenny show, Nanci Griffith re-vealed that one of her goals is to be as good a songwriter as Jimmy Webb. Lloyd Cole said much the same thing about a month ago, describing Webb’s composition ‘Do What You Gotta Do’, as “the best song ever written.”

Paddy McAloon also cites Webb as a primary influence as does Roddy Frame and Nick Kelly. Artists who have covered his songs include Frank Sinatra, Scott Walker, Glen Campbell, Ray Charles, The Supremes, The Four Tops, Waylon Jennings, Linda Ronstadt, Art Garfunkel, Nina Simone and Richard Harris.

The Irish connection, probably most evident in his relationship with Richard Harris, has always been of central importance to Webb. It began in his childhood, with the Appalachian hymns he sang in Church and blossomed in 1968 when he had one of his first major hits, with Harris’s interpretation of MacArthur Park which was followed by the Webb/Harris concept albums, A Tramp Shining, The Yard Went On Forever and My Boy. On Webb’s latest album, the magnificent Suspending Disbelief, this Irish dimension manifests itself again in the minor chords that link much of the music and most specifically in a song entitled ‘Sandycove’ which was inspired by his visit to the South Dublin suburb of the same name the last time Webb visited this country two years ago.

Jimmy Webb also recently described two of his most poetic songs, ‘All My Love’s Laughter’ and ‘The Moon’s A Harsh Mistress’ as “descended from Irish folk music, modern attempts at writing ancient songs, as in their form and the romanticism evident in lines like ‘your tenderest warning/could bruise all her charms.’” It seems fitting, therefore, that Webb was the first International songwriter invited to appear in what one hopes will turn out to be an annual event, The Church and General Celebration Concert which focused solely on the talents of songwriters and composers.

What follows is a drawing together of conversations I’ve had with Jimmy Webb over the past five years. I first met him in Los Angeles in 1988, when I saw a felt-pen written handbill tied to a lamppost outside a hotel advertising, ‘Jimmy Webb. 8pm. Tonight.’ Having asked to “speak to Mr. Webb, please” I soon found myself in his room improvising a one hour interview, with no research other than the memory of the six, or so, Webb albums I had back in Ireland, and a lifelong love of his work.

The next time I met him, three years later, he was hungover and depressed in the lobby of Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel, angry at the fact that he’d allowed someone to cajole him into singing at George’s Bistro the night before and that few people present seemed to know, or care, who he was. One month ago in his New York studio it was a far more triumphant Jimmy Webb I encountered, about to be interviewed by Q magazine, aware that Vox had recently voted his Archive compilation ‘Reissue of the Month’ and ready to premiere his new album at what eventually was a hugely successful concert at New York’s Lincoln Centre. Last weekend I spoke to him again, on the phone to Nashville.

Ask him what has kept him going over a 25 year career that has been marked by many similar peaks and lows, on both a musical and personal level, and he will promptly reply “work”. Born in Elk City, Oklahoma in 1946, his strict adherence to the work ethic was passed on to him by his Baptist Minister father, Robert, and his mother, Sylvia Ann who, as he recounts in the song, ‘Work for A Dollar’, instilled in him this ability to apply himself to the hard grind.

“Everybody has to work for the dollar,” he said, speaking from Los Angeles in 1988.

“No matter where you come from no one can be so pompous, or self-satisfied, that they know for sure that their little kingdom won’t come toppling down. We’re all workers. That’s always been my attitude and though I know some artists, such as songwriters, don’t like the notion that what they are doing is basically product created to be brought to the market place, I’ve never had any problem with that idea.”

Sitting in that Grade A hotel in Hollywood could Webb still feel connected to his working class roots, or was he looking back at the twenty-year-old boy he was when he first came to L.A. and thinking “if I saw that hick now, I wouldn’t recognise him. Or want to?”

“No way!” he said, laughing. “The very deepest emotions I feel are those that surface when I think about where I came from. That’s where the heart of my music comes from, whether it’s rooted in my working class background, my Baptist Church background or my parents themselves. Certainly the first composing I ever did was in Church, the first singing I ever did was in Church and I embrace that aspect of my background fervently.

“I’m fiercely proud of the way I was raised and the things I inherited from my parents. But I must admit to you that I don’t feel as rooted in my background, geographically, as I could. I don’t go back to Oklahoma as often as I should. And I miss it. I love the plains, I love it out where the land is flat and love that great bowel of night that settles down over the countryside in the summertime, where you can see the stars all the way to the horizon, 360 degrees around. That’s what I miss. You never see stars here in L.A. or in New York City. But you do in Ireland, and that’s why I felt so comfortable there the first time I went over with Richard in the 60s.”

Before that, in 1966, having settled in Los Angeles, one of the first jobs Webb got was working as a contract writer for Joe Beck “right over there on the corner of Hollywood and Vine.”

“I’d come here with many, many songs but no takers then I got that job with Joe and wrote 45 songs for him. And we did get some recorded, like a Christmas song by The Supremes, which gave me the first money I ever got from a record! Then I hooked up with the Fifth Dimension who had a huge hit with ‘Up, Up and Away’ then Glen Campbell’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’. And all this happened a year before Richard and I had that hit with ‘Macarthur Park’ so it’s not factually true when people claim that he “discovered” me. I was rolling along very nicely, before we met!”

But was he? There are claims that fame made Webb cocky and not so “nice” a guy to know. Is that true?

“Subsequent to my success I probably did become a cocky kid. I pretty much did what I wanted to do and didn’t ask anyone’s permission. And if I didn’t like something, I’d say so. One thing I remember, that I regret, is that I was scoring music for a film and when it was done, the producers said to my agent ‘will he rewrite this because we don’t like the direction it’s gone, yet want to give him another chance. “I said ‘tell them to go screw themselves’ not realising that film companies normally don’t give composers a second chance to write. Yet I was so immature and cocky I thought they could go stuff themselves, and they did. But how could I have known what I was doing when I was only 20 years old. Who does?”

Reflecting on the ways he did slowly mature and grow beyond his “cocky but also shy and introverted nature,” Webb revealed that the person who probably influenced him most at the time was Richard Harris, with whom he clearly became besotted.

“He was taking me all over the place, taking me to London, Ireland, and I was going to bars with him, even staying in his house. I loved him and I still love him dearly and think he was a great influence on me, because he was rowdy and loud and assertive and, as I said, I needed to develop some of those characteristics.”

And yet beneath the Rabellasian facade Richard Harris himself also was, and is, deeply introverted, a fact that was highlighted when he published his own book of poetry in 1973 and contributed to the My Boy album one of its most moving songs, ‘All The Broken Children’

“That is absolutely true but this is not a side of Richard Harris he revealed to many people in those days, or does now,” said Webb. “And my first experiences with him were very emotional, sharing music with him, talking about poetry. I met him here in L.A. when he was doing a benefit. So, even the first time I came into contact with him he was raising money for someone else, which is also something he tends not to talk about. But, yes, he was a deeply expressive, emotional man.”

There have been suggestions that Harris used Webb as a surrogate writer, sitting and talking with him about his childhood in Ireland and his deteriorating marriage, then dispatching him off to write the tracks that later became A Tramp Shining. Was that true?

“Well, you know that I’d tried to get the Fifth Dimension to record ‘Macarthur Park’ and things like ‘Didn’t We’ probably related as much to my own love life at the time, as did ‘Dancing Girl’ which I wrote as a result of my first great affair, with Suzy Horton.

“But overall, yeah, we were buddies and we knew each other and I was trying to write an album that was, to some degree, an honest reflection of his life. In fact, I was talking to him the other day and he said he hadn’t listened to A Tramp Shining in years and when he played it recently he wept like a baby. So, obviously it was a part of him that had not been tapped until that time, whether it was through my music or his close connection with the creation of some of those songs. He needed to express himself that way and I still feel he was remarkably successful, in this sense, with something like ‘MacArthur Park’. That song has been done by so many other people, from Frank Sinatra to Waylon Jennings to Donna Summer but his original recording is still the point of reference.”

Nonetheless, the record has also been described as one of the worst singles ever released, with a vocal labelled almost criminally OTT.

“Those critics should remember that Richard was not a singer at the time, he was an actor, who’d only recently got a chance to sing in the movie of Camelot.. But even though he was not a singer he managed to create what I still describe as a classic work of art in ‘MacArthur Park’. He had a great, dramatic actor’s sense of how to read a lyric and interpret subtexts and so on and, as an Irishman, he positively loves language. No one should underrate Richard Harris’ contribution. I really do believe it was his interpretation that made the song what it was, and still is. No one else has come even close to capturing what it’s all about.”

Harris’s vocal contribution to the album The Yard Went On Forever was equally crucial, said Webb. Composed during a year of social upheaval in the United States, the album is probably best described as the musical equivalent of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a positively gothic song cycle graphically exploring the loss of innocence in love and in politics, a landscape in which everything that is pure has been raped and polluted.

“Well, I was going through a gothic mood at the time, as a result of the fact that Suzy Horton had married another guy,” reflected Webb. “And what I loved about working with Richard at that point was that his voice could capture that, and all you describe. It’s like writing a movie score in which he can sing and act and emote and, as such, it has to have some epic scale to it, like The Yard Went On Forever. His voice can tackle even those major themes and that’s what he loves doing. So, writing for Richard I was free to be as dramatic as I chose, as panoramic and more stylised than were I writing, say, for Glen Campbell, which I also did at that time. Richard just had that great sweeping voice.”

The latter, unfortunately, is not true of Jimmy Webb himself, whose voice has, nonetheless improved over the years and is itself now the perfect instrument to express the muted gothic sense at the soul of Suspending Disbelief. But what is his response to the claim that he screwed up his own career back in the late 60s/early 70s by focusing all his attention on becoming a performer rather than remaining in the background, as a songwriter and composer?

“Well, I agree with you about my voice back then,” he said, laughing. “I don’t like to listen to my earliest recordings because my voice is so small, so thin. But that other remark is pure garbage. I never made a record that I didn’t get a cover off of. At the very worst, my albums were excellent demos. So there’s no way you can damage your career, as a songwriter, by putting your best stuff on an album. So I wasn’t drawing that line between being a songwriter and being a performer that some critics now say I was foolish to cross.”

Webb’s early albums like Words and Music (1970) and And So: On (1972) may have been uneven, but they certainly, as he said earlier, led to classic cover versions. The latter alone had ‘All My Love’s Laughter’ and ‘If Ships Were Made To Sail’ , which were both given sublime interpretations by Scott Walker; and ‘See You Then’ which received a definitive reading from Ray Charles. His next album, Letters (1972), was, without a doubt, his early masterpiece and apart from delivering another song to Scott Walker, ‘Where Can Brown Begin’ also contained his own equally powerful and poetic interpretations of tracks such as ‘Hurt Me Bad’ and ‘Simile’.

In ‘Song Seller’ he also viciously attacked radio programmers, singing “Now I’ll cut you a track that’s really truckin/If you want me to I’ll sing about fucking/Sing about it fast and sing about it slow/Wanna hear it on the radio, though.” Needless to say, with such a lyric the track was never played on American radio.

“Hey, come on now, any songwriter will tell you how frustrating it is to be writing what you consider to be your best work and not to get the chance to get that work to the public. That’s what I was writing about in that song and I don’t regret doing that” he says. “I agree that Letters was my best album up to that point and I was deeply disappointed that it didn’t sell. And over the following ten years all I had released were three more albums, none of which really did very well. Even though the album I did with George Martin producing, El Mirage, also contained some of my best work, like ‘Christian No’ and ‘The Highwayman’. That too was very distressing. I was working my ass off and I seemed to visit every radio station in the United States but to no avail. Finally they got tired of seeing me coming and they’d say ‘oh shit, it’s Jimmy Webb, again.’ It was not easy, believe me. It’s still not.”

Three years later things obviously were still “not easy” for Jimmy Webb, despite the fact that Messrs Kristofferson, Cash and co. had chosen ‘The Highwayman’ as the theme song of an album and tour. He also had four songs on a Linda Ronstadt album which went double-platinum and was working on two Broadway shows. However, hung-over, and sitting in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel Webb admitted that one thing certainly troubling him was Paul Simon’s comment that “the age of melody is over.” As a composer who is, in equal measures, a master of lyric-writing and musical composition, and who sees both elements as integral to the success of a song, Jimmy Webb sees this scenario as somewhat similar to the end of the world. Or rather, the end of his world.

“If it’s true I guess all this can be traced back to Dylan whose talking blues were probably an early version of rap,” he said. “Yet even though more and more people now seem to be saying that, for all his greatness, Dylan damaged songwriting by focusing too much on words, at the expense of music, I still think he extended our art further than anyone -before, or since. But if the age of melody is over, that is shocking to someone like me, because if it is, I’m completely out of business!”

So, apart from Dylan, who were Jimmy Webb’s early influences?

“Well, because of my love for both words and music I loved guys like Lennon and McCartney who write wonderful songs, in a rounded sense. They had a tremendous influence on me, as did Bacherach and David. But I think it’s a little narrow to imagine that songwriters are only influenced by other songwriters, as opposed to being influenced by your cultural background in general.

“I was also a big Science Fiction fan as a kid, reading Bradbury, Asimov and all those and that certainly comes out in the songs. I also read Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Yeats and positively adore James Joyce. There definitely was that literary bias in our home, and an air of scholarly intent, and I picked up on that. So it seemed quite natural to me to write my first song, at 13, ‘Someone Else’ which ended up on Art Garfunkel’s Watermark album.”

All of Jimmy Webb’s work is orchestrated, in the purest sense, a musical tendency he partly traces back to his love of classical music.

“Around the age of 17, 18 I fell under the spell of Ralph Vaughen Williams, one of the great symphonists of our time” he explained. “I was heavily influenced by him and by Ravel, people I would describe as chordalists.

“It’s a very important part of my music, it’s where I draw a lot of my inspiration from and, frankly, it makes music interesting for me to listen to. Otherwise it’s a crashing bore. If it doesn’t have any dissonance, any suspensions, any interesting substitutions or unexpected elements why bother to compose anything at all? So, as you can see, I really am deeply rooted in the age of melody! That’s why I’m so worried these days. But these things run in cycles and, deep down I’m not sure Paul Simon is right.”

What about his own base in the 60s, which was the decade in which rock music allegedly became socially aware. Is there any specific political ideology running through Webb’s songs?

“Sure, there is, some columnist in the Washington Post said I was “to the left of Karl Marx” and that’s probably true!” he laughed. “I don’t like the Republicans and what they’ve done with America. I don’t like the almost palpable atmosphere of racism and oppression in the country. And, yes, I wish we had John F. Kennedy back and Bobby Kennedy. That’s the kind of romanticism that links many of my songs, a political idealism that definitely has its roots in the 1960s, when we had a chance to turn the United States around and didn’t, because we fucked up, basically.

“But I do believe my songs are full of social commentary. The Yard Went On Forever album definitely did reflect events in 1968, as you say. Indeed, what I probably didn’t tell you the last time we talked about it is that the opening song is written around Bobby Kennedy’s last words, when he said “is everybody safe? “ He was down, he was shot, he was dying and the last thing he said was “is everybody safe?” And that’s still the only question: “is everybody safe?” If you can blithely go about your business while people are being murdered and starved and violated in every way then you’re not much of a human being. That’s the kind of ideology that comes across in all of my records, if you listen closely.”

However, Webb suggested that this political dimension in his work may have been missed by many critics and fans, because of the middle-of-the-road nature of most of the artists who sung the songs.

“I was extremely successful doing this and I made a lot of money but part of the price was that I probably have been pigeonholed and written off as a middle-of-the-road writer, probably even as a Republican, conservative type, which, obviously, I’m not,” he said, clearly frustrated by the idea.

Certainly, Webb’s experimentation with drugs marks him out as far from conservative.

“I never wrote drug music, though many see ‘Up, Up and Away’ as one of the first drug songs,” he recalled, laughing. “But it wasn’t, even though it was banned by some radio stations as such. And yet, as with myself, there are very few people of my generation who didn’t have a brush with some kind of narcotics. Yet, despite claims to the contrary, I really do believe that drugs are damaging in terms of creativity. You might have a rush which contains some kind of insight and if you’re together enough you could try to scribble that down and hope it makes sense the next morning, but most of the time you’re just into enjoying the drug. And over a period of time overuse of drugs just becomes destructive. They become the object rather than the subject that might lead you to a higher experience or help you to create great art, or whatever.

“That’s why I take an anti-drugs stance now and don’t want any of my five kids to have anything to do with drugs at all. And I do tell them, “I did drugs and it was a terrible experience for me, in the end. It hurt me. It hurt my creativity, my career, my wife, my friends.” And I really hope, in that I’m giving them the information they need to make the right decision.”

Of course, Jimmy Webb could also remind his children of the fact that “technically speaking” he was written off as “in effect, dead” at one point after a drug overdose. In the sleeve notes of Archives he reveals that his song ‘Once in the Morning’ was not about sex, as one might assume, but about his use of cocaine. However he OD’d on something altogether different, he admits.

“I was never addicted to drugs, as such. For example, I only experimented with hallucinogenics a couple of times” he said. “My major problem, with substances was with cocaine for about 10 years, from 1972, I was definitely dancing with the devil. And at my 30th birthday I had the rather unfortunate experience of being slipped PCP – which is a terrible drug that induces schizophrenia – and virtually did die. I was in a coma for 24 hours and on oxygen and all that. It was one of the most horrible things that has ever happened to me. But I hadn’t chosen to take that drug or ingest it and I finally put all that stuff behind me in 1982.”

Eleven years later, Jimmy Webb is very much alive and, speaking from Nashville he’s reflecting on the journey that has taken him all the way from ‘Galveston’ to ‘Sandycove’, the elegiac song he wrote in the shadow of the Martello Tower which is the setting for the opening section of Ulysses, by his beloved James Joyce.

“That day was a real odyssey for me. I went to all the pubs Joyce used to drink in and to Joyce’s tower and I even ended up starting that song in a James Joyce notebook a friend had given me the day before!” he recalls.” But I did get into a very introverted mood, which ended up dominating that song. And if it’s an elegy it’s an elegy for something lost, like, as I say, my ‘grandpa’s ship in a bottle’ which symbolises deeper concerns, the loss of something precious, which is the theme of many of my songs. But this song is different because as you grow older you realise that some things, when they are lost, are lost forever and you have to learn to let go. You have to realise that some things are so precious that when lost they will never be replaced. Like friendships, or love.”

Or heroes. In another song from the new album, ‘Elvis and Me’, Webb looks at the world through the eyes of an Elvis fan who still can’t quite come to terms with the death of his king and who seems to have remained emotionally frozen back at that moment where he met Presley in Las Vegas. Or where he dreamed he did.

“It’s partly autobiographical,” says Webb. “I did meet Elvis in Vegas and he talked, at length about the idea of him doing ‘MacArthur Park’ in his show which he said was a song he loved. He was really into orchestras at that stage and was fascinated by my work at that level, because, he said, he’d been influenced by stuff like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper, as we all had been.

“In fact, for a while, at that point, Lennon and McCartney were seriously entertaining the idea of doing an album with him but his management killed that idea and I myself certainly wasn’t encouraged to sit around playing tunes for Elvis, because Tom Parker, basically, got the publishing on everything Presley recorded. And I wasn’t about to give up publishing rights, nor were Lennon and McCartney – just to have Elvis record your song.

“So he was terribly frustrated at that level. Though, someone did send me a bootleg tape of him singing ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ in concert. And I later heard that when Steve Binder heard him sing a snatch of ‘MacArthur Park’ during rehearsals for the 68 Comeback show he actually had asked him “would you record that kind of stuff?” and when Elvis said “sure I would” that led to Binder commissioning the song ‘If I Can Dream’ and closing the show on a more contemporary note than had been originally planned. That’s a pretty precious memory of the man, for me.

“I was raised on the kind of gospel music Elvis loved. My dad was a minister and he loved people like Jake Hess and The Blackwood Brothers, just like Elvis did. What I loved about Elvis was that even his pop records, even songs about sex, had that gospel feel, because of the Jordanaires and so on. ‘I Will Arise’ is a bow to all that, to my father and my mother and the roots of my songwriting which, as I said, remain rooted in my background in the Baptist Church. That song is a good example of this, a haunting progression of minor chords that I originally began to improvise on when I was a kid playing piano in Church. I call those basic, sad, tunes Appalachian. In fact the hymn tune name of ‘I Will Arise’ is ‘Appalachia’.

Anyone who saw Philip King’s documentary, Bringing It All Back Home, will realise that Irish emigrants heavily influence Appalachian music. And more than one commentator has accurately noted that the defining factor linking all great Irish music, from a sean nos through Van Morrison to Davy Spillane and U2, is its sense of spiritual yearning.

“That’s why I say I really am connected to Irish music somewhere down there by my solar plexus,” says Jimmy Webb, laughing. “I’m deeply moved by it and even way back, during that first trip to Ireland, with Richard, 25 years ago, we went to all these old pubs and I learned many, many Irish songs, like ‘Carrickfergus’.

“One of my favourite records of all time is Irish Heartbeat by Van Morrison and the Chieftains, which features that song. And when I did ‘Watermark’ with Art Garfunkel, we got Paddy Moloney to play on ‘She Moves Through The Fair’. I really do love that music. The real point is that at that time a producer named Alan O’Duffy introduced me too the Percy French repertoire and when he taught me more of those songs I suddenly realised I was connected to that music already. These were the kind of tunes I’d learned in the Church since I was a boy. They were elegantly sculpted melodies, with these compelling minor to major chord changes, substitutive chord effects, beautiful tunes and sad, soulful. And that has been the dominant mode in my own music, and certainly is on my new album, Suspending Disbelief.

“I can honestly say that part of the way I feel music is rooted in what must have been some Irish ancestry along the way. To some degree Irish music is in my blood and was there long before I even knew what it was. Maybe, slowly, many Americans will come to realise the same thing.”